The primary hard drive in my Vista media center (Dell XPS 410) died a hard death, so I got a new drive and started rebuilding. Well, it turns out that my Vista DVD is pre-sp1, which means the SATA driver I needed wasn't there. I tried getting one from Dell downloads, but it didn't work. I got to the point in setup where it SAID it was copying files, but nothing happened - overnight. Since I have only a small amount of time late at night for personal projects, after the second day my wife was ready ......

Okay, the Verizon installers came out and set things up today. They ran a short coax cable from the outside box (where my fiber terminates) into a splitter, then disconnected my DirecTV lines and connected the cables they used to get to the STB's. Kind of interesting - they had to use special splitters that actually have circuit boards. This is not simply a video signal, it's IPTV. Every connection got tested and retested, and the signal was so strong they had to put an inline widget to reduce it ......

Hopefully this will help someone else who runs into the same thing. After I'd tracked down and installed several older drivers (last being dated 8/15/06), none of them working, I tried something on a whim. I shut down the ehshell and the scheduling services (both of the running Media Center services), then opened Device Manager. I then brought up the properties for tuner 1 and clicked on Update Driver, then let it pick the best one. It installed one from January '07, must be latest. Okayed that and ......

I have the Hauppauge WinTV-PVR-500 dual tuner, and it's worked fine with WinXP MCE 2005 and DirecTV. However, Verizon is making available FIOS-TV (I already have FIOS internet service), and I'm switching. So, I did some checking and found that you need Vista to work with FIOS TV. Okay, no problem, I've been meaning to upgrade my XP MCE box to Vista for a while now. Sure, I had to do BIOS upgrades, firmware upgrades, and get new drivers for my video and sound cards. No biggie, used to that. Ran the ......

I have a Compaq laptop that I attempted to install Vista 64-bit on, but ran into driver issues (sound, video missing, wireless LAN flaky), so I decided to rebuild with the 32-bit Vista. I assumed (rightly) that driver support would be better. All the installs were done by booting directly from the DVD, and I had everything backed up onto my server so I formatted the drive as well. I downloaded the ISO from MSDN, burned a DVD using Sonic, and started the install. Got an error 0x80070017 when it was ......